April, Dani - Raven's Ranch (Siren Publishing LoveXtreme) (6 page)

The trailer was heavily insulated and had a strong AC unit and what looked like a pretty good heater for the cold Montana winters. In fact, the insulation was so thick that you couldn’t hear outside sound unless you opened one of the windows.

The bed was small, but as Raven lay down to test it, she found that it was very comfortable. Now if she could only find a way to sneak Connor in there with her someday.

The two little closets were empty. Apparently one of the ranch hands had already cleared out her grandfather’s things to make room for her, but the closets were going to be a problem. They were even smaller than her closets back in the studio had been, and though she was too tired to unpack her things that night, she realized that she was not going to have enough room and would have to keep some of her clothes inside her bags, and living out of her luggage was definitely something Raven did not want to do.

The refrigerator was stocked. Again it looked as if one of her loyal ranch hands had been at work making ready for her arrival. The little kitchenette had a microwave and tiny cupboards full of plates and bowls and cups and glasses. Checking one of the drawers in the kitchen, she found her silverware was also equally as plentiful. There was a small table moored to the wall of the trailer built for two that obviously served as her dining room, although it was actually a part of the kitchenette itself.

Lastly, Raven walked to the back of the trailer and found her bathroom. She wrinkled her nose at this. It was clean and had a toilet and lavatory but no shower, and the cabinet space over the lavatory would only be big enough to hold a toothbrush and little more. Also, there was no shower. Where was the shower? Certainly the ranch hands had to take showers. After all, spending a day working on the range must have left them sweaty and in need of a little soap and water.

Returning to the front of the trailer, Raven saw a desk, and on top of it was all the business accounts and ledgers, contracts and live stock prices at the market. This was obviously the CEO’s desk of the Lazy L. This would have been the sensible place for a PC or laptop to be housed, but no such luck. Raven still had her iPad with her, so she wasn’t completely disconnected from the rest of the world, but a computer for this desk was something she made a mental note of to look into.

She flipped through the business documents on top of the desk and found them to be in disarray. Raven was a very orderly person by nature and knew that she could straighten out the files in a few hours, but was too tired on her first night to think about even starting the task and realized it could wait for the following day.

She would have liked to take a shower before crawling into the little bunk bed in back and falling to sleep, but she guessed she couldn’t expect everything on her first night at the new place. On the whole she thought the trailer was livable, and that was the important thing.

The AC unit was turned off, and it was kind of stuffy inside the trailer, but the night was cool enough that she didn’t think it called for turning on the AC, so she opened the window next to her bunk bed to let in the fresh night air from the range.

She stripped off her jeans and T-shirt and crawled into bed in nothing but her panties, covering herself with the light blanket over the bed. Not able to sleep immediately, her head still swirling from all that had happened to her in the last few days, she lay there and looked up at the ceiling, which was just a few feet over her head.

Outside she heard someone playing the guitar. She knew this must have been Chip. It was a lonely prairie melody that soothed her to her very soul. Soon she drifted off to a dreamless sleep.

Chapter Five

When Raven awoke the next morning, it was well past sunrise, and if there was anything she remembered from her life before on the ranch, she knew that everyone got up about an hour before sunrise and started to work. She made a note to set up her alarm by her bunk bed so that she would not be tardy in waking up again. She wanted to make a good first impression on her ranch hands, and sleeping late on her first day was probably a bad start, but if that was the only bad thing that happened she felt she could probably recover.

She got up and shrugged into a long T-shirt that fell to her knees. Then she checked the refrigerator. There were the makings for a nice bacon and eggs breakfast, and in a cabinet over the refrigerator she found instant coffee. However, she didn’t like to eat breakfast before clearing her head with a shower first.

She unpacked a couple of towels from her luggage, threw one around her neck, and then went outside to find someone to tell her where the shower facilities were.

The yard outside was deserted. The ranch hands must have already left to start their day. The sun was bright and warm overhead, and the sky was blue and cloudless. A wind blew off the prairie with an eerie whistle that made Raven feel like she was the last person on the face of the earth.

Raven decided to be brave. She was standing on her own land after all, and so she took off walking down the yard. As she did so, a big pile of tumbleweed blew past her naked legs. She was barefoot, and the gravel from the yard bit into the soles of her feet. The wind blew her hair wildly, and she had to scoop it out of her eyes and squint as dust blew into her face.

She didn’t find anything that looked like a shower. There were no buildings around, just the trailers. She noted that all the hands had left their trailer doors open, and none of them had curtains in the windows. They obviously cared little about privacy. That wasn’t going to be her, however. She liked to walk around in her underwear too much. She would need curtains on her windows, and it would also be nice if her door locked. The night before when she was looking through her trailer, she hadn’t even thought about the lack of curtains or blinds in the windows, and she guessed that she had probably slept all night with her door unlocked. She wondered if there was even a way to lock her door.

When she got to the end of the yard she came to a long fence. Stopping by the fence, she stared out at the vast prairie land ranging before her. It was a staggering sight. The land was clear as far as the eye could see, and then the foothills peered up above the horizon, but she knew they must have been ten miles away. Then above the foothills, even further away, the mountains loomed, watching majestically over her land, their tops still covered with snow even though it was now the middle of summer.

Raven stood there and got lost in the sight of all that land for a while. This was the first time she had realized—really come to grips with—what a huge thing the Lazy L really was and how big a responsibility was now on her shoulders. All of that empty land, all hers. She doubted that even her grandfather had ever walked over every mile of it, even though he had spent his entire life there.

She also got some inkling as to how people living out here in the country could become more spiritual than those in the city. Raven herself had never been a spiritual person and had kicked and screamed, playing the role of the tomboy, when her mother had tried taking her to church as a girl. Those outings to church were the only times when her mother would force her to wear a dress. But now, standing here up against the rickety, old wooden fence, the cool mountain wind sailing past her face, she started to understand what it was to be spiritual, not religious, that was a different ball game, but just spiritual with knowledge of how tiny each person really was in the world. It was impossible not to have a healthy respect for nature, even a fear of it when standing here from this vantage point, alone and looking at the miles of emptiness.

Raven turned about and walked back through the yard. She passed her trailer and then headed off in the opposite direction, still on a mission to find someone or find a building that had a shower inside.

She saw a friendly sight parked to the south end of the trailer yard. Her motorbike. Connor must have unloaded it for her that morning. When she came up to it, she found he had even shined it for her. It was proudly standing on its kickstand and waiting for her to come and ride it. God, what a wonderful land this would be to ride her bike through, she thought as she touched the handles. She determined that as soon as she took a shower, ate breakfast, and perhaps had a chance to talk with some of the guys about the daily routine, she would take her bike out for a long ride across the plains.

Leaving her bike behind, she kept walking, her feet becoming sore from the little pebbles hitting her bare soles as she stepped along on tiptoes.

Up ahead about twenty yards farther on, she saw a small building. Actually it was not a building so much as it was a lean-to, a few poles stuck in the ground holding up a heavy tarp that served as both walls and roof for the structure. She saw that the cement base the structure had been set up on was recently wet, and this attracted her to walk up to it, having to traipse through a weed-infested yard as she went, the gravel path ending before it made its way that far.

Mosquitoes nipped at her bare legs as she walked through the weeds that came up to past her knees. Her footfalls seemed to scare little creatures out of their weed-covered hiding places. She heard things scurrying away from her as she approached, not sure if what she heard were large bugs running from her, or maybe field mice. Whatever they were, she knew she was being foolhardy to walk through the weeds with no shoes on, and almost half naked. Next time she would know better, she told herself and bravely kept going.

When she got to the structure, she realized that the wet cement was caused by a small stream of water that was running underneath the tarp, covering the lean-to. It felt good to have her bare feet touch the cement and her legs free of the scratching weeds of the yard. However, this only felt good for about a minute. Then as she walked about the structure to inspect it, she realized that the cement was getting uncomfortably warm against her feet, forcing her to high-step across the patio that led to the entrance.

There was a loose hanging flap in the tarp that apparently served as a door for the lean-to. Feeling awkward about just barging inside, she hesitated for a moment in front of the flap.

“Hello?” she called, but got no reply.

The bottoms of her feet were beginning to sting from the heated cement, and she decided she was foolish to be so timid. After all this was her land and so this lean-to, whatever it was, also belonged to her.

She pushed back the flap and cautiously stepped inside. It was dark in there. No widows were cut into the tarp to provide light. The only light there was came sneaking in underneath the tarp and this was only barely enough at first to see by. After a couple of minutes her eyes adjusted to the change from the bright sun outside to the dreariness of the inside.

The whole area under the tarp roof was damp, and Raven instantly realized she had found what she was looking for. Back to the end of the structure was a partition, and behind this were half a dozen tiny shower stalls, the musty odor of shower water and soap pervading the enclosure.

Though Raven had been looking for a place to take her morning shower, this was not exactly what she’d had in mind. As she stepped down the row of shower stalls, she tried to imagine herself taking a shower in any one of them and just could not bring the image to mind. Only a slight partition separated each one, giving merely the hint of privacy without actually providing any.

Outside the row of stalls was an area to hang towels and a long row of wash basins. She noticed that each of the wash basins had a mirror hung over it and this would be convenient to comb your hair or brush your teeth in, but she wanted to laugh when she saw that each mirror gave a perfect view into the shower stall that was opposite it. So forget about taking a shower in private, she told herself.

This arrangement would not work out for very long. She would have to speak to the ranch hands about changing things. Obviously a bunch of range-toughened ranch hands weren’t too modest around each other, but that would not work out for her.

No one was around right now, however. The hands were all out on the prairie, probably five or ten miles away. This would be a good time to sneak in a shower. She desperately wanted one. Not having taken one the night before, she still felt mucky from the long road trip.

Taking one last walk around the entire shower area to ensure she was the only one there, she satisfied herself that she was truly alone. She chose the stall all the way back in the corner, hung up her towels outside, and took her T-shirt off over her head and kicked off her panties.

Stepping into the stall, she had to fumble around for a few minutes to determine how to start the water flow, and also where was the shower head? At last she looked up and saw a long jet nozzle placed overhead on a rack. She lifted this down and found a knob on it that controlled the flow of water. She gently turned it on and was given a rude awakening when water came roaring out into her face in a strong stream that was mountain cold, the spray jetting over her face and matting her hair.